Yet Another Journal

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» Saturday, June 22, 2019
Sabbath Days

"So," I said to James, "what do we have to do today?"

You know what? Nothing. No need to go out in the damn heat. So that's what we did. I happened to change stations on the television to find something better for Snowy and came upon the last day of the Royal Ascot races showing on NBC Sports until one p.m. Ascot is basically like the Kentucky Derby spread out in five days. The Queen opens it and often watches the races (sometimes she has horses entered herself), and everyone wears their best clothes (men wear morning suits!) and men have top hats and women wear all these little colorful confections of hats. I love watching the English race horses. American horses seem almost uniformly brown—chestnuts, bays, blood bays. The horses at Ascot come in all colors, and a beautiful grey horse (not a dapple grey, which is born black and gets whiter as he gets older, but a stunning silvery pewter color) won the Hardwicke Stakes, name Defoe. You can tell this horse was well raised; he was very calm and curious about everything, ears forward, just taking it all in. Little bit of a dish to his face; that's the Arabian blood showing through.

After the races ended I put on The Right Stuff. Lots of facts tweaked and humor added, and I understand Gordon Cooper hated Dennis Quaid's portrayal of him, but a great film about the awe of flight. I was curious what happened to Jane Dornacker, the actress who played the deadpan "Nurse Murch," so looked her up. Very interesting, but ultimately sad: apparently she was the postal service's first female carrier. She did Right Stuff and another film, then got into comedy and did news reports for WNBC radio. In 1986 she and the pilot of the helicopter she was riding in crashed in the Hudson River and both died. Since her husband had died not long before, this left their only child an orphan.

[Alas, on Sunday, my lower GI was in an uproar. I got the towels washed and the meds sorted, but I was pretty sick all day. Nearly threw up a couple of times.]

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